from MICHAEL GOODWIN
Pearls clutched, hair on fire, heads exploding — pick your favorite image to describe the left’s latest reaction to President Trump. Once again, the end is near, he’s gone too far, this time we got him.
His outrage against all that is good and pure was to pink-slip star impeachment witnesses Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland.
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“Friday Night Massacre” screamed the usual suspects, a not-very-subtle reference to Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” The difference, unmentioned, is that Trump was already acquitted, whereas the Nixon impeachment hadn’t formally started.
Still, assuming this is not the end of the world, something more important demands attention. Namely, that conventional wisdom got it right when it declared that Trump had one of the best weeks of his presidency while Democrats had one of their worst.
He beat impeachment, they screwed up the Iowa caucuses, he gave a roaring State of the Union address and Nancy Pelosi was reduced to being a paper shredder. Friday’s boffo jobs report was the icing on Trump’s cake, then he got the cherry when a federal appeals court unanimously rejected a suit by 200 Dem lawmakers over foreign payments to his businesses.
But arrogance springs eternal in the land of nattering nabobs and expect media bigs to assure their fellow never-Trumpers that soon enough, the world will be set right. Trump, they will say with certainty, can’t sustain the momentum and Pelosi, she of the alleged brilliant political skills, will lead Dems back to their entitled supremacy.
Anything is possible and there is no denying that Trump has a bad habit of stepping on his own good stories. But the larger notion that last week was an aberration strikes me as fanciful if not delusional.
I believe the lopsided outcomes reveal something close to the actual state of play and relative strengths of the combatants. If true, that means Trump and congressional Republicans have an enormous opportunity this year.
The heart of the case is that Dems dug themselves into a hole and won’t drop the shovel. They have nothing to show for their 2018 House victory except a partisan impeachment that was rejected by the public before the Senate killed it.
The celebration over getting Sen. Mitt Romney’s vote on one article is like cheering because your team avoided a shutout. You still got crushed.
Wonder of wonders, party leaders reacted by vowing to stay the course. Pelosi, not a whit embarrassed by her shameful stunt of tearing up the president’s State of the Union address, launched into another hateful rant.
Saying Trump looked “sedated,” she called his speech a “manifesto of mistruths” and claimed he “shredded the truth in the speech, shredded the Constitution in his conduct, and so I shredded his state-of-mind address.”
Equally telling, Rep. Jerry Nadler said the Judiciary Committee likely will subpoena former national security adviser John Bolton; other Dems said the many investigations into Trump and his businesses will continue.
In other words, they learned nothing from last week, or the last three years for that matter. Blinded by their personal contempt for the president and his supporters and captive to the wacko wing of the party, Pelosi’s team still acts as if there is a magic button that will persuade even the deplorables to turn on the president.
Meanwhile, Dems obviously intend to fritter away their two years of power without producing a coherent agenda that would give swing voters a reason to reelect them. A November platform of resistance, rage and failed impeachment is a narrow base appeal, not an effort to win the middle.
The party’s presidential candidates are also lost in space and aren’t even generating the expected enthusiasm among primary voters. The counting debacle in Iowa obscured a larger problem: the caucus turnout was about 25 percent below estimates.+
The Friday-night debate was another pointless race to far left field, with no clear winner. The only guarantees are that Joe Biden is near the end and there will be a freakout among big donors if Sen. Bernie Sanders wins New Hampshire and becomes the clear front-runner.
With Michael Bloomberg’s billions hovering off-stage, the blood-letting is just beginning.
This is all great for Trump, but the fact that he is in his strongest position yet is not owing solely to Dems’ errors. His policy successes are undeniable, starting with the economy. Its continued expansion is simply remarkable and when the president says it is the envy of the world, he’s not exaggerating.
His poll numbers rose 10 points during impeachment and Gallup’s finding that he gets a whopping 63% approval on the economy confirms that more and more people are seeing and believing the jobs boom.
Gallup also found that 90% of Americans, the highest ever, report they are satisfied with their personal lives, and that a record 65% say they are “very satisfied.”
Those kind of numbers rip the heart out of the claim by Sanders and others that the economy is working only for the rich. In fact, wages are rising faster at the bottom of the income ladder than at the top.
While Dems are busy feuding and feeding their base, the president is broadening his outreach by stealing some of their policies. Paid family leave, curbing prescription-drug prices and prison reform all run counter to GOP orthodoxy, but Trump is embracing them while keeping near-unanimous Republican support.
And to judge from his gallery guests at the State of the Union, Trump is eager to make direct appeals to black and Latino Americans on pocketbook and family issues. He talks about an “inclusive” agenda and notably included Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr. in a list of American heroes. He continued that theme in a visit to a North Carolina community college.
His approval ratings among those groups already are far above the vote totals he got in 2016. Even modest increases in November could be decisive in key states.
To be sure, the election is a long way off and events, like Trump, are unpredictable. But for now he is on a roll while the other team is stuck in a hole.
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